Ol’ Number 31

Naturally we wondered what lucky actor was #0000001. It must be the greatest or the most popular actor of all time, right? Surprise!

Hey, we love him, but… you know.

The IMDB switched to these numbers a few years ago. Their URLs used to feature names, like “name/hepburn_katharine.” (We should know: we had to go through and switch all the links on Who2 when they changed.)

But we got to wondering about the low end. After Astaire at 1 comes Lauren Bacall at 0000002 and Brigitte Bardot at 0000003. Yes: alphabetical.

But only actors, and only older ones. Gable, Garland and Gielgud are 22, 23 and 24. And on up to Natalie Wood and Victor Young at 0000081 and 0000082.

But then, wait. Number 0000083 is… Alan Miller? (He’s the editor of the 2007 film African Bambi. You probably knew that already.) What’s up there? He’s not even the first Alan Miller in the IMDB database — he’s Alan Miller number three.

Miller is followed by a few other wild cards — Aleksei Korenev at 00000088, J. Riefel at 00000094 — and then it starts all over again alphabetically, with Woody Allen and Gillian Anderson at 00000095 and 00000096.

Weird, huh? Wouldn’t you think the numbers would be either entirely random, or entirely alphabetical at the time they switched over? Who chose those top 83, and why? And how did Alan Miller III get in there first after the overture?